Ep #261: The Solution Cycle

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 261.

Welcome to The Empowered Principal™ Podcast, a not so typical educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy by refining your most powerful tool, your mind. Here’s your host certified life coach Angela Kelly Robeck.

Well hello my empowered leaders. welcome to the last Empowered Principal™ podcast of 2022. Can you believe it? This year has flown by, and what an amazing year it has been. I just am going to sing my clients praises. I’m going to celebrate them. I have been reflecting on this year, and how much I have loved, loved my clients, and how much I love the results they are creating for themselves and their schools.

My clients this year are fire. They are smart and innovative. They’re just go getters. they have been pushing the boundaries of school leadership in a very, very good way. They’re not just accepting the status quo. They’re not just taking the job and well, I guess this is how it is. I guess this is what it’s supposed to be. this is how it’s always been done.

They’re finding ways to over deliver results in less time, manage people in a way that’s honest and compassionate. They’re leveraging resources in ways that no one has thought of before, and they’re differentiating the difference between hustle and burn out versus working hard and loving it. I’m going to talk a little bit more about that in next year’s podcast. I’ve got a little thought I want you to consider that will help you stop feeling exhausted and burned out. I’m going to share that on next week’s podcast. So tune into that, okay.

I’m gonna have some of my newer clients on the podcast in the upcoming months because I know that when you listeners out there hear the clients themselves and hear it right out of their mouths and the experiences they’re having, that inspires you. It inspires you to believe in yourself and to trust that you’re doing it right. to trust that you have what it takes. You’re listening to people out there who are brand new, who are doing the work you’re doing. So I love having my clients on the podcast. I’ve got a whole nother round of people to share with you their journey, their experiences, their successes, their failures, the tips and strategies that they have for you. we will get to them in the upcoming months.

But as I was reflecting on this year, and all that I love about this year, and the people that I’m working with and the offers I’ve been making, the content I’ve been creating, I just had to take a moment and celebrate my clients publicly. They are incredible leaders doing incredible work, and I am so honored and so touched to be their coach. They really are the highlight of my week.

So I want to shout out to Dina, Wendy, Emily, Erica, Blanca, Aaron, Lisa, Alex, Pam, Rebecca, Jenna, Kate, Leslie, Amy, and Nicole. You all are the most amazing school leaders on the planet that I know of. I congratulate you, and I wish you the happiest of New Years. I can’t wait to go even bigger and better with you in 2023. You are taking education to new heights and new places. I’m so excited for all of you. So congratulations on a wonderful year. We’re going to celebrate all your successes on the podcast with the listeners and the audience.

I want to take this opportunity to invite my new round of school leaders, people who are interested and ready to go. We are making changes through the Empowered Principal™ program that make your success in evitable. It can’t not happen through coaching. my question to you is are you going to be on this list in 2023? Yes, you are. You are ready and the doors are open. Let’s go.

for those of you who have been interested in coaching and you’re desiring to have a coach and you’re ready to coach and you want to coach, but you’re having the thought that you can’t right now or you shouldn’t invest coaching mid-year. Like if you’re thinking, well, it’s the middle of the year. Why sign up now?

Let me tell you something, it is the best time to start coaching. here’s why. You have six months left of this current school year. Six months. That is six months to create an impact with this year’s staff and students, your current staff, your current set of students, families. You have six more months with them. That’s a lot of time.

because the program is a year long, you still get six more months to plan and prepare and kick off the next school year. So people who sign up now, in December and in January, you get the best of both. You get like a double bang for your buck because you are impacting this year and you’re impacting next year. You literally get two years’ worth of value and impact in the 12 months of coaching time that we have together. You get to apply everything that you learn to this year’s group of kids, and you have six more months with next year’s group of kids. you have this work for the remainder of your career.

listen, I have to tell you guys this stat. I was looking up the percentage of my clients who sign up for a second year, a third year, fourth year. I have an 89% return rate for clients. 89% of my clients sign up multiple years because of the impact that they are creating through coaching. So what this means for you, as a listener who wants to be a client of the Empowered Principal™ coaching program is that I am having less and less space available because my former clients are still clients, and they’re filling up the spots.

So listen up. If you’ve been interested but you haven’t made the decision, now is the time. You get 12 months of coaching. You’re going to impact two years’ worth of students in a one season coaching program. So starting mid-year is the best time. When you sign up, you’re also going to get all of my content, all of my resources, including the Mid-Year Reboot. So you want to sign up for the Mid-Year Reboot this January, okay.

The doors are open for the Empowered Principal™ program. I have a few spots left. I’m not gonna lie. They’re limited. But I want to encourage you. If you are considering coaching and you want to create impact, and you want to love your job, love your life, have work-life balance, get more done in less time, and really innovate and reinvent the entire experience of education. That’s what this program is about. Okay.

So talk with your partner or with your spouse. Plan on having a standing 30 minute meeting with me every single week. We talk on the phone. You don’t have to be Zoom ready. I just call you at the same time, the same day, every single week. We have a 30 minute power coaching session. You will apply that coaching for the week, and you come back and we solve another problem.

Sometimes I get through two and three problems in 30 minutes with my clients. That’s how fast we coach. That’s how fast we problem solve. It’s 30 minutes of your week. You can handle that you have the time. if you don’t believe you have the time, that’s the very first thing we coach on. I teach you how to create more time for yourself.

So do what you need to do. Get your finances in order or talk to your spouse or your partner. Make a decision that you’re committed, you’re all in, you’re ready to go. Plan on a 30 minute call with me. So get your time schedule in order. I have limited numbers, but I will make it work for you. I promise. I always have been able to make it work. It’s only 30 minutes a week. So make the decision, schedule your consult. Let’s get you on the calendar and let’s go.

Okay, listen up. I am telling you that these life coaching tools are simply leadership tools. So I don’t want you to be freaked out by the term life coaching. It’s simply leadership coaching, right. How you lead your school is how you lead life, and how you lead life is how you lead school. They’re just tools. They are tools that help you implement and speed up your success and the success of your school.

These are tools to help you understand how you and those you lead make decisions. It helps you understand why people behave the way they do. It helps you understand how to hold space for them. It helps you understand how to inspire people into your vision, right? These are tools and strategies that help you leverage everything you need to be successful as a school leader.

I honestly feel like I have won the lottery when it comes to life coaching and learning about coaching and having a coach myself. my clients all say the same thing to me. Every time I get off the phone with them, they’re saying, “I’m so glad we talked. I feel so much better. I’m clear on what to do.” So they usually walk away either feeling much better about a situation. They’re calmer and more relaxed. They feel more certain and confident about the next steps they need to take. Or they’re feeling very clear about what they need to process or what they’re in the middle of processing.

So I say you’re in the process of processing some type of thought or situation or emotion that they’re feeling. So when we coach, we problem solve. We create clarity. You get to kind of vent out your frustrations, and then we come up with a plan. If you’re knocking your head on the wall to try and come up with a solution, I will help you with that. Sometimes we just simply celebrate for 30 minutes because there’s so many things going well.

We work on your three month plan. We work on your life and leadership legacy plan. We do it all. We get your time under control. We help leverage all the resources you have available to you. I help you work with adult individuals. Working with humans is not easy. I help you do that, right.

So even on the toughest of days, what I see in my clients is that they leave the call understanding why they feel the way they do, and how to hold space for themselves to be human, to make mistakes, to experience a failure and disappointment and not make it mean that they’re not good. They’re not cut out to be a leader, all of that business, right.

I like to tell my clients that I am the pioneer of life coaching. I consider myself as the pioneer life coach for school leaders. I have embodied that self-concept. I really do believe I am one of the first of my kind to bring the tools of life coaching to education. I’m one of the very first life coaches to ever apply this work directly into my own school leadership position, but I specifically work with principals.

now as my work is becoming more mainstream, I do work with district level leaders. I have probably a third of my clients are district level leaders. Some of them are people that I started as principals and they got promoted into district level positions. Other people have just called me when they got into a district level position and hired me as their coach or hired me for professional development.

So I have to say, though, and this is no disrespect to my district level leaders, I love working with you too. But my heart is with the site leaders because it’s such a challenging position. It’s such a unique position within education. Because the site leader, I call it the ultimate middle manager. Because your responsibilities include working with every level of the district, this community at large, your neighborhood, the parents, teachers, support staff, students, outside agencies, outside programs.

Then you’ve got your district officials. You’re coaching at your site level. You’re coaching up. You’re talking with the school board. You’re working with the county, the state, the feds, all those folks. You have a lot of management. When it comes to people management, you are managing a lot of humans, a lot of human energy, a lot of human thoughts, a lot of human emotion.

so what I help you do to thrive as a leader is I help you have a very highly managed mind. Because you must be able to access all of this in order to sustain yourself as a school leader and to feel good about who you are and the progress you’re making even when the results haven’t showed up yet. Okay.

So you must be able to access your awareness. You have to tune in to what’s going on inside your brain and speculate what’s going on in other people’s brain. You got to tap into how you’re feeling and why you’re feeling this way. You want to observe how your personal and professional values and beliefs impact your decisions and actions. you want to see the connection between those decisions and actions and the results they’re creating.

if you’re not getting the results that you want, if your intended desires and results are not being met, it’s because there’s a thought error going on or there is an obstacle, a thought obstacle that’s blocking and preventing you from achieving to that next level. Having a coach makes this so much easier because this is very difficult to do on your own. One of the obstacles that I see in school leaders who want to coach but don’t reach out for coaching is they believe that they should be figuring this all out on their own.

I’m here to tell you absolutely not. You don’t expect kids to come into school and know how to do school without teacher support and guidance. You don’t expect teachers brand new ones to come in and be expert teachers and know how to do everything their first year. So why would you, in a school leadership position, magically now need to be perfect and know everything and be able to figure it all on your own. That’s not how this works.

We are in the business of learning, and learning is about learning from others. Coaching is learning. Coaching is leading. It’s learning how to lead. To lead yourself so that you can better lead others.

I want you to stop and think about the past week you’ve had. All the issues you were faced with. The people you met with, the students you interacted with, the teachers you spoke with, the meetings you attended, the projects you were handed to complete, problems that you faced, problems that you solved, problems that you have yet to deal with, right. our to do list is usually like a list of problems to solve.

But I want you to just to hone in on this one week. notice how this particular week made you feel overall. So if you had to describe how you feel about this past week with one word, or if you’re listening to this on Tuesday because the podcast drops on Tuesday, think about last week. If you had to describe last week with one word, one emotion or one word, what would that word be? Would it be accomplished, proud, determined? Or would it be something like overwhelmed, exhausted, discouraged?

Take a moment, whatever it is, whether it’s a really good feeling, or more of a negative feeling, and just sit with it. Notice how it buzzes in your body. notice that when you have an emotion inside of your body, there is an urge. There is an urge to either act or an urge to like embrace and sit with it. So the feel good feels. If you had an amazing week last week, and you’re feeling accomplished and productive and proud of yourself and determined and motivated. When you’re feeling all of that, you just you want to sit in embrace that feeling. It feels amazing in your body. Your vibration is really high, right? It’s very pleasing to the body.

But what if you’ve had a really hard week, a really crappy week, and you’re discouraged, and you’re exhausted, and you’re overwhelmed, and you’re doubting yourself, and you’re wondering if you should quit, or if you’re not cut out to be a leader. Like you’re questioning or doubting yourself. Those feelings, those emotional vibrations in your body, they’re very uncomfortable. the body and the brain’s urge is to get out of that emotion. It’s to distract yourself or to buffer or to talk about something else, think about something else, or physically get up and move.

When you’re uncomfortable with your emotion, you feel, at least for me, I feel very restless. It’s very uncomfortable to sit with discomfort in the body. My body wants to move and shake it out. Or I just want to like succumb to it and just collapse on the couch or in bed and just be there. So notice the feeling.

This sounds like it has nothing to do with leadership, but I’m going to tell you it has everything to do with leadership. Because your emotional vibration in your body is what impacts the decisions you make and the actions you take.

So if you’re feeling really good, notice what your body does. It smiles. You might give yourself a little hug. You might raise your head a little higher. Your body feels very content. Do you celebrate those wins? Like are the actions that you’re taking? You’re going out and celebrating. Maybe you’re cheersing with a toast of champagne or something fun.

Or maybe you’re feeling the urge to quit, to distract yourself, to take a nap, to buffer with wine or with snacks. Just notice the connection between how you feel and the actions you feel the urge to take. Or the actions you feel the urge not to take, like the inaction. You want to sit with indecision or sit in procrastination because you don’t like how decision making feels or you don’t like how taking the action feels. It goes both ways.

So whatever your week offered you, I’m sure of this. I’m sure that it offered you some problems. There was some kind of problem to solve, whether it was a big problem or a small problem. One of your jobs as a school leader is to solve problems. Okay?

So, here’s what I want to offer you. I want you to try this thought on and see how it feels. I believe that coaching is the solution to every problem we face, to any problem, past, present, future. I truly believe this in my entire body. Because I’ve just seen too much evidence of it being true to not believe it. I literally can’t unsee it. I can’t not believe it anymore.

here’s why. The title of this podcast is called the solution cycle. I want you to stop and think about what a solution is. What is a solution? The easiest answer that comes to mind, it’s the answer to a problem, right? It solves a problem.

So where do solutions come from? When you think about where does a solution come from? What is a solution? Our brain is what generates solutions. Solutions are ideas, new ideas, different ideas, creative ideas, innovative ideas. Ideas are just thoughts. An idea is a sentence that runs through your head. Thoughts create solutions.

what we spend time thinking about impacts the solutions we generate. What we believe is possible, or impossible, determines the level of solution we are able to offer our schools. Think about this. Solutions are simply sentences in our brain. They are ideas, they are thoughts. We all have thoughts, which means we all can generate solutions. the way to any solution is a thought. We have to have a new idea or have a different way of thinking that generates a different approach, that generates a different set of actions, that generates a different result.

I want to ask you this, if you woke up each morning, and you really believed this about yourself, I have the bandwidth to work hard achieving my goals at school and take care of business at home and have plenty of time for fun, rest, and recovery. What if you believed you had the bandwidth to live your full life, your professional life, your personal life, and your interpersonal life?

What if you had the bandwidth to do that all? If you woke up and thought I have plenty of time and energy to take care of myself, to take care of my family and friends and to take care of my school. I have the bandwidth. I have the capacity to do all that I want to do. How would it feel to wake up every day with that thought?

These are some of the sentences that I tell myself every morning. That I have the bandwidth professionally and personally and interpersonally. That I have all the resources I need available to me to solve any problem that comes my way. Because the truth is what solves problems are solutions, and solutions are simply thoughts, ideas, sentences in our brain. I have sentences in my brain. So I have to be aware of them because sometimes solutions come and go. I’m not aware. I didn’t catch it the first time. I have to think about it again. Okay.

I can ask for help to solve problems and achieve my goals faster if I ask for help. This was a huge thought for me to lean into. Because as a school leader, I was told that it was my job to figure things out on my own. that I shouldn’t be burdening district level management with my questions and my problems.

Now, I had some amazing people up at district office who did want to take time to mentor me and coach me and guide me. Thank goodness for those lovely humans. A special shout out to my friend Cathy who was a friend through and through throughout my years of school leadership. But we really are told not to ask for help.

Because if you think about it, the only reason your district level administration is saying don’t ask for help, figure it out on your own, it’s because they are so time constrained. They are so burdened. They are so overwhelmed trying to solve their own set of problems at their level that they don’t feel like they have the bandwidth. But if they had the bandwidth, they would say sure, come on in. Let’s go. Let’s problem solve. We got this.

I want you to believe that you do have the bandwidth, you have resources available, that it’s acceptable to ask for help. I also love this thought. I have all the time in the world. Doesn’t that thought feels so good? I spend about, I would say, at least 60% of my coaching week is spent on some form of I don’t have enough time, or I don’t have the bandwidth. I coach on those two thoughts.

But if you really borrowed the thought and tried it on, and just let yourself see how it would feel to wake up and be like ah, I have all the time in the world to solve any problem that comes my way. it doesn’t have to be solved today. I have time. Just say that out loud. I have time. How does it feel?

I love this one too. I am a master of solutions. Ooh, I get goosebumps just saying it out loud. I am a master of solutions because that means I’m a master of thinking. I am a thought leader. I am a solution leader. I am in a solution cycle. one of my favorites, I am the pioneer of innovation in education.

I want you to borrow these thoughts. Download the notes, write these down. What if this were your self-concept as a leader? Imagine your impact. Imagine the changes that you could make. imagine how much fun your work would be each day. So try them on, see how they feel. Even if you don’t believe these statements are true about you, maybe you think oh they are true for you or they’re true for somebody else, but not for me. Try them on anyway. What if they were true? Then what would happen? How would you feel? What would you do? What results could you create?

I want to show you this. If this really were your self-concept, here’s what would also be true. If you believe these things about yourself then your brain would be spending more time thinking about who you are waking up to serve each morning. The more you think about who you’re serving, your students and your teachers, the less time you’re spinning out in confusion and in doubt and uncertainty.

I want you to think about a classroom teacher who knows they are great teachers. They aren’t spinning out wondering if they’re good enough, or if they should teach or how to teach it. They’re not spinning out in being new and being B minus. They’re not even thinking about that. What they’re spending their time doing and their mental power on is refining and tweaking and individualizing their offer to their kids, their lessons to their students. They’re thinking about how to reach each and every student, and what approach is going to work best for this group of students.

Teachers who have momentum are future focused. They’re planning for the future. they are certain and they are assured that they are creating results for each and every student every single day. They’re not doubting their ability. They’re not spending their time and energy and brainpower thinking about how they’re not able to do it. They’re thinking about how they are able to do it.

So they’re not worried when little failures come along the way. They just redirect themselves and stay focused on the prize. They’re focused on their vision for their classroom and their students because they believe that that vision is coming true. They work hard, but they love what they do.

this means that when you truly believe in yourself, your brain is now open to think about other things, new ideas, new solutions, because it’s not bogged down with spending its energy trying to convince you and sell you on the fact that you’re good enough, you’re worthy enough, you’re smart enough, you’re capable enough.

Now you’re tapped into a more advanced thought cycle, a more advanced thinking and solution making process. This is when you get out of the overwhelm cycle, and you step into the solution cycle. here’s what the solution cycle looks like. It’s basically the opposite of the overwhelm cycle.

So it looks like this. There’s chaos at your school. There’s chaos at every school. I just call it for what it is. It’s a busy place. There’s a lot going on. sometimes it’s chaotic. I know that word might be a little charged, but there’s a lot of stuff going on, right? There’s chaos at school. It happens. Situations are coming at you left and right.

Now, a solution cycle goes like this. Because you feel certain about yourself and your self-concept as a leader, the chaos being presented to you isn’t a problem. Because you’re not spinning out worrying about if you’re good enough to be able to figure it out, or if you have solutions or if you know or if you don’t know or what somebody’s gonna think. You just believe and trust I’m capable. I have the bandwidth. I can do this. I feel certainty.

From that certainty you create clarity because you develop your school vision based on your leadership values, which grounds you in belief. you prioritize that vision one thing at a time based on the steps that you believe is the next best step for your school. Clarity is created when you prioritize and constrain down to one step at a time.

from there, you’re able to make empowered decisions because they’re grounded in what you value, which makes you even more assured that your decisions are the right ones for your school. you don’t spin out in indecision and procrastination because you trust yourself and your decisions.

the more quickly you’re able to make decisions, the more inspired you feel. the more inspired you feel, the more motivated and determined you become. the more determined you are, the more committed you are to the goals in terms of taking massive action. the more massive action and commitment you exhibit towards those goals, the more certain you are of reaching them.

Which means you don’t have to hustle and be in a rush to do everything all at once because you trust that reaching the goal is inevitable. That implementing the vision is inevitable, that higher test scores and better adjusted students and more emotionally regulated staff and students is inevitable. that is when you’re able to allow tomorrow’s work to wait until tomorrow.

as you continue to generate solutions, you feel more adequate as a leader. this solution cycle is what generates new ideas. You go round and round in this high energy high level thinking solution cycle. that’s what perpetuates your momentum and moves your school forward faster and faster and faster. It’s brilliant.

I really hope to work with you in the 2023 year. Right now is the perfect time. Get double the bang for your buck. Join us over here at the Empowered Principal™ one to one coaching program. So for those of you who don’t know what the coaching program is, it’s a 12 month program. You get 30 minutes alone with me, a one on one session every single week to help you stay in the solution cycle. That is what we do every single week. It makes your success in evitable. I can’t wait to work with you. Schedule your consult today. Let’s get started. Happy New Year everyone. I will see you in January. Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal™ Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, please visit angelakellycoaching.com where you can sign up for weekly updates and learn more about the tools that will help you become an emotionally fit school leader.